Starting An Online Or Any Other Business
Some years ago when the dot com boom was in full flow, everyone thought that the internet was a sure fire way to become a millionaire overnight. Then came the big crash which left most of the start ups with burnt fingers, or worse. There are many reasons why this happened, but the biggest one was that people were so involved with the potential of the internet and the incredible business opportunities it offered that they forgot the most basic issue.
Running an Online Business – A Checklist
Before you take the plunge into online business, you need to be aware of the complexities of it. It may appear to be as simple as setting you a website and offering goods for sale, but it is not. It is a business and you need to run it like one. Everyone thinks of marketing and sales, but people often overlook the procedural basics of running an online business.
Ecomic down turn might not be such a bad thing
With the US economy rebounding, a lot of the major retailers are predicting that feudal buying by consumers will continue into the later half of 2009.
I think that when there is an economic down turn, people start to be careful with their expenses and this becomes a habit that continues into better times.
Economic down turn might not be such a bad thing after all, eh?
Fighting Price Wars
I was reading a great post by Seth Godin on offering intangibles to beef up your service. He lists a few ideas on how to add value to your service instead of cutting prices. Prices wars is an issue that I have been thinking about for a long time and after reading that post decided to post about my own experience with cutting prices to increase sales.
Olympics 2008 Kicks off in China
A superb inagural ceremony marked the official kick off of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China. The light show, the various other effects and finally the fireworks were mind blowing. It goes to show that China has improved so much over the years and had come of age.
Small Business Blog – How to start and succeed online
I have been blogging on this site for quite a while now. I never had any particular goal for this blog except for posting what ever caught my fancy. But of late I began to feel that a blog with out direction was one that was doomed to fail.
I do not have too many visitors to this blog (around 10 a day) and practically no subscribers (2 RSS subscribers as of today).
So I have decided seriously to dedicate this blog (at least for some time) to the all important topic of starting and running small businesses online. This is a topic dear to my heart. I have started and succeeded in a number of online ventures. I have successful websites that provide graphic design, branding, website design and software/application development. I have been doing this since 1999 and believe have gained some experience.
Are you in the tribe?
Seth Godin, one of my favorite authors and marketing experts, is launching a new book called “Tribes” in October of this year. He has also posted a kind of membership sign up on his blog related to this book.
The membership is to an exclusive website or tribe of like minded marketers where they can share thoughts, ideas and even coloborate on projects. Using one of the principles from his up coming book, Seth has invited people to pre-order his book and then email him with the reciept. He would then add you to his tribe.
A fantastic way to drum up interest in his book. He says that this is not a ploy intended to sell more books but rather to set a hurdle to any one interested in joining the tribe. His tribe is not open for all and he says that when there is exclusivity and some sort of a hurdle, the right people will join.
As always, I like the way Seth thinks. Can’t wait to read his new book and get into his tribe.
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class in wordpress plugin automatic update
I have bunch of plugins on blog. Today I decided to update some of them to the latest versions. One of the plugins is called “WordPress Automatic Upgrade”. This updates your entire wordpress system to the latest version and I have found it to be immensely useful.
However, when this plugin is activated and I try to update the other plugins, I get an error:
“Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class…”
The best way to get rid of this error message and enable all plugins to be automatically updatable, is to deactivate your “WordPress Automatic Upgrade” plugin and then update the rest.
Rising grocery prices
We came back from Tesco yesterday with our weekly groceries, with a $80 bill. We were quite surprised because a few months back, we would have got the same stuff for around $60.
The rising oil prices, the global credit crunch and the inflation make for a difficult time ahead. Even though the oil price has drpped down slightly compared to a few weeks ago, prices are still on the rise for groceries and food items.
In terms of small businesses, now is the time to be careful. Consumers are fairly tight with their purses and especially for service based industries such as design and software development, projects are hard to come by.
HSBC Vs. Citibank
Today I wanted to deposit some money into my Citibank account. I went down to the branch in Canary Wharf.
I forgot to take my Citicard and realized that the pay in machine does not let you deposit cash if you do not have your card with you. Being a Saturday there were no staff present to take my cash.
I them proceeded to the HSBC branch and saw that the cash paton machines would let you enter your account details even if you forgot your card and also counted the notes before recording the deposit.
What a difference in customer centric features!